Last Friday (March 20) Highrise turned two. We couldn’t be more proud of how much it’s grown since it popped out of our dev servers and onto the internet. Here’s the original post that launched Highrise back in 2007.
For the past year or so, Highrise has been our fastest growing product on a month-to-month revenue growth basis. And lately it’s really taken off. We see Basecamp-like growth patterns which has us very excited.
For fun we’ve posted some growth charts below. We love the slow and steady curves. No sharp bull or bear markets — just steady predictable growth.
BTW: Highrise Deals were launched last October so the chart is shorter and steeper. We expect this to take on a more steady form as time goes on.
To everyone who uses Highrise: Thanks so much! We really hope you’re finding it useful. To those who don’t, how about giving it a try? It’s the best way we know to keep track of who you talk to, what was said, and what you need to do next. It helps you prepare for that next call, that next meeting, that next conversation. You’ll be amazed at how amazed other people are when you’re better prepared.
Tim
on 23 Mar 09Labels for the Y-Axis please
Or, simply give % numbers.
Mimo
on 23 Mar 09Thanks for sharing and congrats for your anniversary.
George
on 23 Mar 09Technically the Deals chart isn’t “steeper”, because you haven’t labelled the Y axis? Similarly, it can’t become more steady, it just has to keep doing that and the graph will look like the others in two years time?
Scott Miller
on 23 Mar 09Thanks a bunch for disclosing the data but….........I can’t help wonder if there is more to the story than the correlation between adding more functionality and uptick in users.
Might it be that you are realizing the “network effects” of a sizable base of Highrise users who are referring others to try your product? Do you collect data on how new users found Highrise?
mikemike
on 23 Mar 09@37 Signals
Hey guys, I’d love to see what you guys use for hardware. How many servers, and with how much ram/processors/harddrive, etc.
That’d be exciting to see.
Happy
on 24 Mar 09Good job with Highrise and congrats on the steady upward trend that portends only a fantastic future for 37signals and your apps!
Alexander Poliakov
on 24 Mar 09Thank you for sharing, but please update Y-axis with actual figures or at least %. For now these charts a bit of nonsense from informational point of view.
Adam
on 24 Mar 09@mikemike
this may give you some idea:
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1185-the-need-for-speed-making-basecamp-faster
Vance Lucas
on 24 Mar 09I understand by the graphs that you guys don’t want to post numbers, but I would love to see some generic percent (%) growth numbers. Especially at the point where you really knew the application was starting to take off and was going to make some serious money.
And looking at the other comments here already, I know I’m not the only entrepreneur who really wants to see those stats.
Matti
on 24 Mar 09WOW! 4 tags in 2 years!
Robin Hood
on 24 Mar 09Thanks for sharing and congrats on the growth. Would be significantly more informational with some sort of percentage growth or y-axis label.
Berserk
on 24 Mar 09I, too, understand why you don’t want to publish any hard numbers but these graphs are (sorry) totally useless. The steady growth, which obviously is what you want to show, could be shown with one graph. The value added by the rest of them is zero (without hard numbers).
texec
on 24 Mar 09Beautiful graphs. Next time advertisement without graphs (saves bandwith and time for you). Please.
Johnny
on 25 Mar 09These charts are absolutely worthless w/o the labels.
Elliott
on 25 Mar 09@Johnny: Jason was making reference to the rate of change over time being smooth…that is evident even without the labels.
Happy
on 25 Mar 09The graphs clearly show smooth growth over time. All the people saying ‘useless’ need to work on their big-picture skills. Jason’s simply showing their growth pattern is not one of big spikes followed by flat plataues and this pattern follows for all aspects of highrise. Plus, they just look neat.
Happy
on 25 Mar 09As to people looking for percentages, it’s pretty clear to me – the leftmost value is 0, the rightmost is 100% of today’s count, and everything in between is to that scale.
Also, you can see that the rate of growth is increasing over time by the concave shape of the graphs. Finally, you can see the growth rate has accelerated recently. Far from ‘useless’, I find the graphs interesting.
Berserk
on 25 Mar 09@Happy,
That was why I said that one graph would have been plenty. I have never used Highrise, but I find it odd that, given the nice and steady growth in revenues, that any of the other graphs would have spiked in a non-correlating way.
What I’m trying to say is, keep the revenue graph but lose the others (as they add nothing).
Of course the top value to the right is 100% of today’s amount, and the bottom of the y-axis is 0% of today’s amount. However, given no indication of what 100% is… As someone said, four tags in two years. Nice and steady growth. Now, we all know that 37s is a very successful company, but the graphs themselves, or in the context of this post (that is, forget what you know of 37s) are useless. (However, I can accept the revenue graph to show the steady growth. The rest is filler.)
Some of them might have been more useful as bar graphs, with 100% being the month (or any give time period) with the highest actual amount. That would show better the actual growth. Maybe that is what is actually being shown as opposed to the total number of tags? (That is also unclear.)
Sorry for my ramblings, I’m tired and the textarea is small :).
This discussion is closed.